In My Time - Dick Cheney [197]
In truth, by this time I was skeptical that Arafat could ever be a partner for peace. I believe the president shared my concerns. Just a few months before, Israeli commandos had stormed a freighter on the Red Sea, the Karine-A, and found millions of dollars of Iranian-produced weapons bound for terrorists in Gaza. There was no doubt in my mind that Arafat and his colleagues were behind the purchase. Their real interest was in the Karine-A’s cargo of Katyusha rockets and C-4 explosive, not in peace.
Still, I stressed to Prime Minister Blair that the United States would certainly remain engaged in attempting to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but we would not do so at the expense of the War on Terror. I was not as confident as Blair that solving this crisis would take the steam out of the terrorist threat. I believed then, and do now, that were the Israeli-Palestinian crisis solved tomorrow, the terrorists would simply find another rationale for their continuing jihad.
At a press conference following our session, the prime minister was unhesitating in describing the threat that his intelligence, as well as ours, indicated that Saddam represented:
Let’s be under no doubt whatever, Saddam Hussein has acquired weapons of mass destruction over a long period of time. He’s the only leader in the world that’s actually used chemical weapons against his own people. He is in breach of at least nine UN Security Council resolutions about weapons of mass destruction.
Blair concluded, “That there is a threat from Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction that he has acquired is not in doubt at all.” I added that in the context of what we had learned about al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical capability, we needed to be very concerned “about the potential marriage, if you will, between a terrorist organization like al Qaeda and those who hold or are proliferating knowledge about weapons of mass destruction.”
That afternoon Lynne and I took a brief side trip to visit Winston Churchill’s war rooms, the underground complex used by the prime minister and his cabinet during World War II. The modest rooms, their walls hung with yellowed maps, were a powerful reminder of Churchill’s brave leadership and the heroic fight of the Allies against Hitler. I remembered first reading Churchill’s account of World War II nearly forty years before when I’d been building power line in Wyoming during the day and reading his volumes by a Coleman lantern at night.
I FLEW FROM LONDON to Amman, Jordan, for meetings with King Abdullah II. During the first Gulf War, King Abdullah’s father, the late King Hussein, had sided with Saddam Hussein, but now Jordan was a close ally in the War on Terror. I thanked the king for Jordan’s help in combatting terror and then walked him through our concerns about Iraq, none of which surprised him. Iraq’s neighbors were keenly aware of the threat Saddam posed, but they were apprehensive about the consequences of military action. I made clear that military action was not imminent, but could become necessary. If so, it would be decisive, with no question about the outcome.
I told the king that if it came to war, there were a number of fronts on which we would likely request Jordanian assistance. I advised him as well that the president was very interested in consulting with him in the weeks and months ahead. We realized that any military action could have serious economic and political consequences, and we wanted to do what we could to mitigate them.
The king pressed for us to redouble our efforts on the peace process, and I assured him of President Bush’s commitment, noting that he had dispatched retired General Anthony Zinni to the region to do what he could to get the peace process back on track. I observed that even though we did not support some of the key elements of the initiative recently announced by Saudi Crown